


blood on his hands

by viceandvirtue



Series: is society to blame [2]
Category: Death Note (Anime & Manga)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-19
Updated: 2018-11-19
Packaged: 2019-08-26 03:18:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 549
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16673698
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/viceandvirtue/pseuds/viceandvirtue
Summary: He hid it well, underneath a veneer of civility, a false skin of humanity that itched at him the longer he wore it.





	blood on his hands

It’s a steady thump, a separate heartbeat. Light doesn’t even have to turn around to know the source of it.

Had he been more unaware, less changed, he might have flinched at the suddenness of the presence. Instead, the instincts that have dulled to a quiet hum in the back of his mind slowly grow in intensity.

 _Skulk, home, safety, ours, safe_  

It runs together until Light can’t parse out the individual words, but he’s enough of a hedonist to admit that he likes the feeling the kitsune’s presence brings and that he craves it on particularly dark nights where his mind isn’t all quite there, torn apart as it is by the Death Note and warped by a kitsune’s power. 

There’s a weight in his lap and a kitsune’s green-gold eyes holding his own sharpened amber and only in his peripheral does he see the seven extra tails tipped in foxfire. If he tries turning his full attention on them they won’t be there. He’s long given up on trying.

He calls the kitsune Konran - chaos. And had he never touched the Death Note, had never taken the long route home while he contemplated what to do with it, he might have never stumbled upon the shrine with the broken rope and would have never found himself under the watch of a centuries-old vixen.

After that, things had changed. He hid it well, underneath a veneer of civility, a false skin of humanity that itched at him the longer he wore it. Over time shred of whatever it was that had made him human flaked away, leaving animal instinct and a different state of mind in its place.

Had he not garnered Konran’s attention, had it only ever been Ryuk, perhaps he would have started to go mad, drunk on power and arrogance, euphoric in his successes. He would have killed the FBI that followed him out of spite and would have played with L’s head, forever pushing just to see the tipping point. 

But now? With a centuries-old being warping his mind and animal instincts riding high in his blood? He doesn’t care for it.

He knows the psychology for what he’s becoming. Half-feral, sociopathic, apathetic. He kills with the Death Note now because it sates some half-buried instinct that Konran awoke the first time she entered his mind and left her mark on it with her paws. Thoughts of a utopia are long gone now.

He’d been watching the case that had built from his killings, from when he killed those people who were too Stupid to be allowed to live, and he knew they had a hard time trying to figure out his new angle, the new motive for the sudden shift in behavior, despite the consistent M.O., destroying every plan and every theory they had ever made.

But it wasn’t his fault that they didn’t see the world as he did, that they didn’t see it for what it was.

With a kitsune buried in his arms and a shinigami at his back, he thinks of the message he sent L, the confusion that it had generated.

If his smile is fanged with teeth well, he’s been hiding the fact that he’s been more animal than human now for a very long time.

 


End file.
